In order to improve the quality of systematic researches, various tools have been developed by well-known scientific institutes sporadically. Dr. Nader Ale Ebrahim has collected these sporadic tools under one roof in a collection named “Research Tool Box”. The toolbox contains over 720 tools so far, classified in 4 main categories: Literature-review, Writing a paper, Targeting suitable journals, as well as Enhancing visibility and impact factor.

Posting Your Latest Article? You Might Have to Take It Down

Guy Leonard received an unpleasant surprise in his inbox early this morning: a notice from Academia.edu saying it had taken down a copy of an article of his that he’d posted on the research-sharing platform. The reason? A takedown request from Elsevier, which publishes the journal in which the paper had appeared.
Mr. Leonard, a research fellow in the University of Exeter’s College of Life and Environmental Sciences, tweeted his dismay and posted a link to a screengrab of the notice.
“Unfortunately, we had to take down your paper,” the notice reads. “Academia.edu is committed to enabling a transition to a world where there is open access to scientific literature. Unfortunately, Elsevier takes a different view.” It also mentions that more than 13,000 researchers so far have signed a petition “protesting Elsevier’s business practices.”
Richard Price, the founder and chief executive officer of Academia.edu, said in an email that “Elsevier has started to send academics on Academia.edu takedown notices in batches of a thousand at a time.” The email Mr. Leonard received “is the notification that we sent to our users,” Mr. Price said, adding that his company usually receives one or two individual notices from publishers a week, “but not at scale like this.” (Academia.edu has close to six million registered users; it said it had received about 2,800 takedown notices from Elsevier so far.)
Mr. Leonard was not the only researcher to receive such a notice this week, as Michael P. Taylor, a paleontologist and open-access advocate, reported in a post on his group blog. Many researchers post copies of their articles online, Mr. Taylor said, even if they’re not legally supposed to. “It’s always been so, because even though technically it’s in breach of the copyright transfer agreements that we blithely sign, everyone knows it’s right and proper,” he wrote. “Preventing people from making their own work available would be insane, and the publisher that did it would be committing a PR gaffe of huge proportions.”
Tom Reller, Elsevier’s vice president for global corporate relations, said via email that the publisher “does issue takedown notices from time to time when the final version of the published journal articles has been, often inadvertently, posted. However, there are many other good options for authors who want to share their article. We aim to ensure that the final published version of an article is readily discoverable and citable via the journal itself in order to maximize the usage metrics and credit for our authors, and to protect the quality and integrity of the scientific record. The formal publications on our platforms also give researchers better tools and links, for example to data.”
Mr. Leonard told The Chronicle by email that it had been his habit to post PDFs of all of his published papers. The disappeared one, which was published in the Elsevier journal Infection, Genetics and Evolution, had been posted on Academia.edu “for at least a year without issue,” as far as he could remember. He noted that a PDF of the paper is also available on ResearchGate.net, another research-networking site, as well as on his current lab’s website. “There may also be a possibility that a copy exists on Mendeley!” he said, referring to the reference-management service. “For now I have not removed the other PDFs and also have not had any requests to remove them.”
The takedown notice had made him rethink where he would choose to publish in the future, Mr. Leonard said. “If I have any say in the next papers published with my work/name, they won’t be in Elsevier journals,” he said. “But either way I will keep posting PDFs of my articles.”Update (12/6/2013, 4:55 p.m.): This post has been updated to include comments from Richard Price, the founder and chief executive officer of Academia.edu.Return to Top

Sunday, 22 December 2013

10 Ways to Increase Usage and Citation of your Published Article Using Social Media

As readers' expectations change, it is important that your article is visible where the user starts their search. Below are some of the social media sites that SAGE recommends for promoting your article and other channels that will offer a direct way to reach your readership.

1. Contribute to Wikipedia
We recognize that many students are increasingly using Wikipedia as the starting point for their research. If there are pages that relate to themes, subjects or research that your article covers, add your article as a reference, with a link to it on SAGE Journals Online. If there isn't a page in existence, why not create one. You can find out how here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Your_first_article2. Join Twitter Twitter is a micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Authors are increasingly promoting their content via twitter which is then picked up by other researchers and practitioners depending on their search parameters. Look at the example here. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Twitter allows you to set up search terms to enable you to monitor what is being talked about in your areas of interest: You can then comment on the relevant conversations. The more you engage, the more people will follow you to listen to your comments and recommendations. As followers come to you, rather than you approaching them, Twitter is an ideal way to reach new audiences.
SAGE's guidelines for how to use Twitter are available here.3. Add content to YouTube
Content is, of course, no longer as narrow as text and figures. It also includes user-generated content and multi-media content such as podcasts and videos. We are seeing an increasing amount of traffic to our journal sites via YouTube as students use video as an initial way of researching a topic. If you already have video content relating to your specific journal article, please let us know and we will add it to our SAGE YouTube channel.4. Start bloggingWondering what to write about? How about:

Your area of research and papers that you have published – and/or other related papers in your field of research. Don't forget to link to them from your blog!

Conferences and training events that you're due to speak at.

Your last conference – were there any interesting questions that came up?

The more you write, the higher your page will appear in search engine results pages when researchers are searching for content – especially as they are increasingly using Google Scholar. SAGE will provide a blogging template and guidelines – please contact us if you would like further information.

5. Join academic social networking sites

Academics, researchers and practitioners are increasingly using social communities as a way of meeting and conversing with people who share the same research interests. These sites offer an immediate way to monitor what other people are looking at in your field of research or as a way to commission papers around online conversations you think are interesting. If there aren't any groups talking about your research interests – set one up. Take a look at MyNetReseach , Academia and Academici for example. There are others too, perhaps you can ask your colleagues which they are part of to decide what suits you best. 6. Create your own website
Do you have your own website? If not, create one! You can create a very clean and simple site using Google sites. SAGE will provide guidelines on how to engage with your audience using social media functionality.7. Utilize social bookmarking with CiteULike
CiteULike is a free service to help you to store, organize and share the scholarly papers you are reading. When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library.CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so there's no need to type them in yourself. It all works from within your web browser so there's no need to install any software. Because your library is stored on the server, you can access it from any computer with an Internet connection.

8. Join Methodspace
Sponsored by SAGE, Methodspace is a new online community for research methods. On the site, you can connect with other researchers, discuss methodology issues and controversies, Discover and review new resources, find relevant conferences and events, and share and solve methodology problems. 9. Join LinkedIn
LinkedIn is an interconnected network of experienced professionals from around the world with over 55 million members. It is not just for career opportunities. When you create your profile that summarizes your professional expertise and accomplishments, why not include aÂ mention of your articles?www.linkedin.com10. Join Facebook
Facebook lets users add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Additionally, users can join networks organized by city, workplace, and school or college. You can also join and create groups according to your interests or areas of expertise.
While social media is increasing in importance, there are other options to draw attention to your latest work: email your networks or post on listservs and websites about your recent publication, and add your article to your course reading list (if appropriate).

Promote your article

We are committed to promoting and increasing the visibility of your article and would like to work with you to promote your paper to potential readers.

... In the Promote Your Article category, I took the suggestion to add the information to my email signature."

Listed below are some simple and effective methods to promote your paper to reach the widest and most appropriate audiences.

Author eprints: Author eprints allow you as an author to quickly and easily give anyone free online access to your article. You can do this by sharing a unique eprint link which will give your friends and contacts free access to read and download your published article without them having to register or even sign in.
To share your eprints simply sign in and go to the Authored Works area within My Account and copy the eprint link. You can then paste this eprint link into an email, add it to your blog or website, or post it to your social media profiles to begin sharing free access to your article. The eprint is the link that starts with "www.tandfonline.com/eprint/" followed by a string of characters and numbers.
You have 50 eprints to share, which gives up to 50 people the chance to read and download a copy of your article. The link will continue to work after the free access allowance has been used up by directing people to the article's abstract page. As the author, you will of course always have free access to your article via My authored works For further information please visit our eprints help guide.

Email signature: use your email signature to tell people about your article. If you would like to include a free banner like the sample below, then please fill out the banner request form.

Twitter and Facebook: authors are increasingly promoting their content via Twitter and Facebook so it can be picked up by other researchers and practitioners. Place an announcement on your Twitter or Facebook page highlighting the publication of your article with a link to direct people to the online version.

LinkedIn:LinkedIn is an interconnected network of experienced professionals from around the world with over 55 million members. It is not just for career opportunities. When you create your profile that summarizes your professional expertise and accomplishments, why not include a mention of your articles?

Join academic social networking sites: academics, researchers, and practitioners are increasingly using social communities such as MyNetReseach and Academici as a way of meeting and conversing with people who share the same research interests.

CiteULike: you could add your article to your personal CiteULike library to share with others, which helps them discover literature which is relevant to their field. You can help with this process just by using CiteULike and through the invite a friend feature.

Discussion lists: post a short message to any discussion lists you are a member of, letting people know that the journal's latest issue, which includes your article, is now available. The easiest way to do this is to register for the table of contents alert for the journal so you can forward the email once you have received it. When browsing our content, at the top of the page (under the journal cover image) you can click on the Alert Me button. Please select the type of alert you require from the dropdown menu (either email alert or RSS feed).

Blogs: if you blog, don't forget to inform other users about your article.

Library recommendation: check your institution has a subscription to the journal. If not, recommend it for the next subscription year.

Free sample copy: encourage others to request a free sample copy from the “Free Sample Copy” link on the journal homepage to introduce them to the work published in the journal.

Book authors: if you have written a book that Routledge has published, you may be interested in how your book is promoted so that it reaches its intended audience, and how you will be supported as an advocate for your book.

Increasing the visibility of your article

When you publish an article, there is much that you can do to ensure that it and your research maximizes its potential within your relevant networks.

What Emerald can do for you

Having published with Emerald means that you are part of a powerful publicity machine. The journal will reach literally hundreds of thousands of potential readers through its online and print subscriber bases.

Build up your own readership and citation

When your article is going to press, send a link to your relevant friends and contacts, notably:

people in your department or organization,

contacts through research groups,

other contacts – people you have met at conferences, seminars, etc.,

relevant special interest groups, Listservs, online discussion forum, any professional bodies of which you are a member,

authors you have cited.

One of the ways you can increase readership of your research is by linking to your article from your Virtual Learning Environment (Moodle, Blackboard, etc). This way you can point students directly to your research. The same applies for your own personal websites or e-mail distribution groups. Linking to the Emerald website, as opposed to distributing a full text version of your article, ensures your article receives accurate download statistics. It also encourages readers to explore other articles within the journal that your article is published, enhancing the profile and impact of that journal (and, consequently, your research).
When you are going to a conference, promote your article and the journal in which it is published. (Note, Emerald can provide you with journal promotional materials). You can thus improve your chances of getting your article known, and hence increase your citation ratings.

Choose a descriptive title

The main way in which someone is going to know whether or not they are sufficiently interested in your article is through its title. Make your titles short, succinct and descriptive, as in the following examples:

"The European automobile industry: escape from parochialism".

"Relationship marketing defined? An examination of current relationship marketing definitions".

"Genetic modification for the production of food: the food industry's response".

"Change and continuity: British/German corporate relationships in the 1990s".

Provide information that is easy to search

Much research information is retrieved online, through search engines, databases and abstracting databases. It is therefore very important that you come up with good, descriptive keywords. These should cover all the key concepts and contexts of the article, including any "buzzwords".

Example

For example, if you were writing an article on e-learning in Poland, you would obviously use the keywords "e-learning" and "Poland"; you would also use terms that were relevant to the type of e-learning which you were writing about, such as "asynchronous communication", as well as activities associated with it, such as "evaluation".
If you were writing about self-management in schools in Hong Kong, you would clearly use "schools" and "Hong Kong", but you would also use words to describe the activity, i.e. "organizational restructuring", "educational administration" as well as buzzwords such as "autonomy".

The golden rule is, think of every likely angle that someone would search on, and make sure that the angle is covered with a keyword.
Once the keyword has thrown up your article, the next search criteria will be the title (see above) and the abstract. The abstract needs to be clear and informative, not just thrown together at the last moment, but giving a real flavour of what the article is about:

What is the key idea?

What research methods have you used?

What are the findings?

What are the implications for practice and for further research?

Emerald journals require extended structured abstracts. Each abstract is made up of a number of set elements to ensure that all abstracts consistently provide the most useful information. For more details on composing an abstract, see our How to... write an abstract guide.
The title, keywords and abstract are all known as "header" information: they are the descriptive tags which enable the user to see whether or not they want to read the article.

How do I use Scopus’ Author Feedback Wizard?

To get to the author feedback wizard, select the Contact and Support link at the bottom of any Scopus page. (Figure 1)

On the Contact Us page you’ll see a link below the comments box which will take you to the Author Feedback Wizard. (Figure 1)

From here, you can search for your name using the author search form.

There are two additional options available to widen your search. First, By selecting the “Add affiliation” you can enter one or more affiliations (current and past)

Second, by selecting the “Add name variant” button you can enter alternative name variations keeping in mind the different ways in which your name has been published in the past. Either of these additional search criteria may be deleted from the search by clicking on the X to the right of the search box.

Welcome to the Author Feedback Wizard. Articles are associated with a particular author based on a sophisticated algorithm. It can happen, however, that multiple profiles exist for one author. In order to correct this, please select all name variations that correspond to you. (Figure 2)

Now choose which name you would like to use for your profile. You can do this by selecting your preferred name spelling from the drop down list.

Review the complete list of documents associated with all of the various author names you have selected to ensure that articles have not been attributed to you in error. (Figure 3)

Remove articles that you did not author or co-author by clicking the check to the left of each article. These documents will be removed from your profile.

If you find an article is missing. At the bottom of your current list of articles, you’ll see a link: “Search for missing documents.” Click here to search for articles based on their titles. (Figure 3)

Review the consolidated list of all articles which will now be associated with you and your profile.

Fill in your contact information and then submit all of your changes to our helpdesk. We will contact you in the event that we have questions and we will notify you once your profile has been updated. Please use the remarks box if you would like to include additional instructions.

Shortly you will receive an email, confirm your request by clicking on the link, a follow-up email will be sent that contains a Thread ID. Keep this ID number and reference it when communicating with our customer support team.

Today we’re launching Scholar Library, your personal collection of articles in Scholar. You can save articles right from the search page, organize them by topic, and use the power of Scholar's full-text search & ranking to quickly find just the one you want - at any time and from anywhere. You decide what goes into your library and we’ll provide all the goodies that come with Scholar search results - up to date article links, citing articles, related articles, formatted citations, links to your university’s subscriptions, and more. And if you have a public Scholar profile, it’s easy to quickly set up your library with the articles you want - with a single click, you can import all the articles in your profile as well as all the articles they cite. Click here and follow the instructions to get started.

Here’s how it looks. Click “Save” below a search result to save it to your library. Click “My library” to see all the articles in your library and search their full text. You can also use labels to organize your articles. To get you started we’ve created two labels, “My Citations” and “Cited by me”, based on your Scholar profile, if you have one. “My Citations” contains your profile articles and “Cited by me” contains articles you’ve cited. See our help page for more details.
We hope you enjoy your personal collection with all the Scholar goodies!

What makes a good title?

What factors transform a mediocre title into a good title? Firstly, it should be both informative and specific, using words or phrases likely to be used when searching for information. Secondly, it should be concise yet convey the main ideas clearly; articles with short titles reporting study findings have been found to attract higher numbers of viewing and citations. Thirdly, provide details of the study design to assist the reader in making an informed choice about the type of project your article is reporting. In taking these small steps when developing your title, it can present a more concise, retrievable and clear articulation of your article.http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hir.12049/abstract

Thursday, 19 December 2013

How to help readers find your article online

The importance of search engines
Google and Google Scholar are the principal ways in which people will find your article online today. Between them they account for 60% of referral traffic to SAGE Journals Online. The search engine is now the first port of call for researchers and it is of paramount importance your article can be found easily in search engine results.
By taking some simple steps to optimize your article for search engines it will help your work to be discovered, then read, used and cited in others’ work. This helps with the ISI Impact Factor of the journal your article is published in and will further raise the visibility of your article.
SAGE already undertakes many measures to ensure SAGE journals are indexed in the all the major search engines. There are over 100 factors that a search engine will look at before deciding how to rank your article in their search results, but the starting point is the content that you write.What do search engines look at?
Today’s search engines use secret complex mathematical algorithms that change every month to keep their search results as accurate as possible. They take into account over 100 different factors and do not disclose the weighting or importance of each. Below are just a few of the elements considered today by search engines:

– the volume of incoming links from related websites

– volume and consistency of searches

– page titles

– time within website

– quality of content

– page views

– relevance

– revisits

– page descriptions

– click-throughs

– quantity of content

– technical user-features

– technical precision of source code

– uniqueness

– spelling

– keywords

– functionalvs broken hyperlinks

So what can you do to help?Repeat key phrases in the abstract while writing naturally
Search engines look at the abstract page of your article, which is free for everyone to look at on SAGE Journals Online. Your abstract is not only the sales pitch that tempts the researcher into reading your article, it’s also the information that gives a search engine all the data it needs to be able to find your article and rank it in the search results page.
Try to repeat the key descriptive phrases. Try to imagine the phrases a researcher might search for if your paper would be of interest to them. Google can detect abuse of this so don’t overplay it, focus on just 3 or 4 key phrases in your abstract.Get the title right
Ensure the main key phrase for your topic is in your article title. Make sure your title is descriptive, unambiguous, accurate and reads well. Remember people search on key phrases not just single words eg ‘women’s health’ not ‘health’. Choose your Key words carefully
Include your main 3 or 4 key phrases and add in at least 3 or 4 additional key words. Where more than one phrase (or abbreviation) is often used to describe the same thing, include both/all variants, e.g. drug names.Summary

What key phrases would you give a search engine if you were searching for your own article?

Write for your audience but bear in mind how search engines work too

Write a clear title with your main key phrase in it

Write an abstract and choose keywords re-iterating 3 or 4 key phrases

Keep it natural - Google will un-index your article if you go overboard on the repetition

The better you write your abstract, the better chance you are giving your article to appear high up in the search results rankings. This is vitally important as researchers will rarely investigate beyond the first 20 results from Google.

Example of an article optimized for search engines
This article comes out top in Google Scholar on a search of ‘depression folic acid’. These are words that researchers are likely to search on. These search terms are highlighted below so you can see the patterns of repeated phrases that Google looks at.

Treatment of depression: time to consider folicacid and vitamin B12

Alec Coppen
MRC Neuropsychiatric Research Laboratory, Epsom, Surrey, UK,Christina Bolander-Gouaille
Pharmacist, Helsingborg, Sweden
We review the findings in major depression: of a low plasma and particularly red cell folate, but also of low vitamin B12 status. Both low folate and low vitamin B12 status have been found in studies of depression: patients, and an association between depression: and low levels of the two vitamins is found in studies of the general population. Low plasma or serum folate has also been found in patients with recurrent mood disorders treated by lithium. A link between depression: and low folate has similalrly been found in patients with alcoholism. It is interesting to note that Hong Kong and Taiwan populations with traditional Chinese diets (rich in folate), including patients with major depression:, have high serum folate concentrations. However, these countries have very low life time rates of major depression:. Low folate levels are furthermore linked to a poor response to antidepressants, and treatment with folicacid is shown to improve response to antidepressants. A recent study also suggests that high vitamin B12 status may be associated with better treatment outcome. Folate and vitamin B12 are major determinants of one-carbon metabolism, in which S-adenosylmethionine (SAM) is formed. SAM donates methyl groups that are crucial for neurological function. Increased plasma homocysteine is a functional marker of both folate and vitamin B12 deficiency. Increased homocysteine levels are found in depressive patients. In a large population study from Norway increased plasma homocysteine was associated with increased risk of depression: but not anxiety. There is now substantial evidence of a common decrease in serum/red blood cell folate, serum vitamin B12 and an increase in plasma homocysteine in depression:. Furthermore, the MTHFR C677T polymorphism that impairs the homocysteine metabolism is shown to be overrepresented among depressive patients, which strengthens the association. On the basis of current data, we suggest that oral doses of both folicacid (800 µg daily) and vitamin B12 (1 mg daily) should be tried to improve treatment outcome in depression.
Key Words: cobalamin • depression: • diet • folate • folicacid • homocysteine • one carbon-metabolism • S-adenosylmethionine • vitamin B12Key points to note:

Clear and descriptive title including main key terms or phrases.

Abstract repeats key phrases in a contextually natural way.

Key terms or phrases repeated in keywords field.

Many other factors influence ranking but this content is written in a way that gives it the best chance

Example of an article that has not been optimized
This article could not be found in Google Scholar after searching on a variety of phrases around the subject of the article, the representation of youth anti-war protests. The words highlighted below are the only terms repeated and these are unlikely to help someone researching this subject find this article via Google.

Peace Children

John Author
Researcher, London, UK
Debate over the role that young people should play in politics reflects different conceptions of childhood and adult concerns about loss of authority and political hegemony. Coverage of demonstrations against the Second Iraq War by the British national press echoes adult discourse on the nature of childhood and exposes the limits set on political activity. Analysis of news-text and images reveals concerns about the political competence of youth, their susceptibility to manipulation and the requirement for social control. Approval of youth’s right to protest was often conditional on the cause espoused. Key Words: childhood • Second Iraq War Key points to note:

The title is meaningless outside the context of the printed journal issue. It might appeal to people but it does not appeal to online search engines.

Title does not include key terms or phrases e.g. ‘youth anti-war protests’

Abstract does not repeat key phrases used within title or article and presents Google with no patterns to look at.

Keywords play a reduced role in SEO but never the less they do have influence. Only two keywords are provided and the article’s key phrases are not listed.

Many other factors influence ranking but this content is written in a way that gives it a very poor chance of being found online through a search engine.

Wednesday, 18 December 2013

Why Does Enhancing Your Impact Matter?

How can authors optimize their dissemination and enhance their research in order to demonstrate quantifiable and meaningful indicators of impact that transcend traditional scientific output measures? What strategies can authors utilize to reach audiences such as funding organizations, colleagues, healthcare providers, policy-makers, students, governmental bodies, the media, consumers, professional organizations and potential clinical trial participants? What options are available for authors to promote resource sharing and publishing productivity?

Repetition, consistency, utilizing multiple modes of dissemination and an awareness of the intended audience help to enhance the impact of an author’s research. Advances in digital technology have allowed authors multiple avenues for disseminating their efforts of their research that can be targeted at various audiences. Why is enhancing your research important?

Confirm and validate research findings

Time-stamp for documenting research findings

Build upon existing knowledge base

Inform researchers and clinicians of updated research findings

Spur ideas for further areas of research

Report to industry of findings that could lead to useful clinical applications

Inform the community of potential new health interventions

Share with clinical research trial participants the results of the research in which they participated

Inform policy-makers of findings in order to effect change in health care policy and practice

Strategies for Authors

Authors are highly recommended to use the same variation of their name consistently throughout the course of their academic studies and future professional activities. If the name is a common name, consider adding a middle name to distinguish it from other authors. If the name is still a common name, consider changing the name. Consistency enhances retrieval and helps to disambiguate author names in databases. Uniqueness of a name helps establishesa “presence” for an author.
Some recommendations:

Check out the Author Identifier feature in the SCOPUS database. The SCOPUS database addresses the issue of author ambiguation and reconciles authors who use different variations of their names throughout their careers. Authors are highly recommended to review their profile in SCOPUS to confirm the profile is correct, and set up alerts for their works.

Register in ResearcherID. ResearcherID assigns a unique identifier to each author.

Perform a Google or Google Scholar search using your name. What publications are attributed to you? Is there any information that can be updated?

Check the website of the academic or research institution you are affiliated with to make sure that your name is noted correctly and that the information is current.

Tracking the Research

Sign up for alerts in databases to keep track of one’s own research as well as other authors or topics. Alerts can be set to run daily, weekly, or monthly and can be sent via email or RSS feed. Examples of search alerts include:

Search query alerts—a query based on a specific keyword or phrase.

Author query alerts—a query based on a specific author.

Publication query alerts—a query based on a specific work that allows for tracking subsequent works added to the database that cite that particular work.

Check out the Author Identifier feature in the SCOPUS database. The SCOPUS database addresses the issue of author name variants and reconciles authors who use different variations of their names throughout their careers. Researchers are highly recommended to review their profile in SCOPUS to confirm the profile is correct, and set up alerts for their works.

Attend conferences of professional organizations.

Take advantage of RSS feeds that serve as a means of aggregating content from various websites, journals, blogs, podcasts, databases, and other web-based sources on behalf of users, without requiring the user to actively monitor the Internet, which can be very time consuming. Some aggregators are extensions of web browsers such as Firefox, or email programs such as Microsoft Outlookor standalone applications such as Google Reader.

Take advantage of email alert services that are available. One example is Google Alerts, which allows for email notification of the latest relevant Google results based on a query. Queries can be based on the name of an author, a research study, a topic, an organization, or any other topic related to your area of research.

Use the RePORTER database to keep abreast of current research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Maintain a series of academic, professional and industry networks to keep track of the current trends in your area of study.

Sign up for social networking sites that allow for networking, keeping track of research and locating others who are working in the same field.

Strategies for Enhancing Research Impact

Register for an ORCID iD. Registering for an ORCID identifier helps to promote discoverability among multiple information platforms and workflows as well as establishing a unique presence for researchers and scholars, regardless of name variants or affiliation history. Registration for the ORCID iD is free and privacy settings are controlled by the individual. Create an ORCID ID, Add Information, Import Works and Connectivity

Authors are highly recommended to use the same variation of their name consistently throughout the course of their academic studies and future professional activities. If the name is a common name, consider adding a middle name to distinguish it from other authors. If the name is still a common name, consider changing the name. Consistency enhances retrieval and helps to disambiguate author names in databases. Uniqueness of a name helps establishes a “presence” for an author.

Authors are highly encouraged to use a standardized version of an affiliation address using no abbreviations.

If the publication was generated as a result of a specific research study or a group such as an academic program of study, a laboratory or clinic, add the name of the research study or group as a corporate author and use the name consistently. Adding a corporate name for a research study or group enhances retrieval of research output by the given study or group.

Publish as much as possible. Publication productivitydemonstrates willingness to shareresearch findings and helps foster knowledge transfer.

Present at conferences or other symposia. Conferences are an excellent venue for disseminating new research findings.

Use declarative titles for publications.

Formulate a concise, well-constructed title and abstract for a work. Include crucial keywords in the abstract. Most databases allow for searching of words noted in a title and an abstract, and secondly, a clear abstract allows users to quickly discern the basis of the work when reviewing a list of results generated by a search query. It is recommended that authors construct an abstract that includes as many specific keywords that summarize the content of the work. What is the work about? Be specific in describing the work to enhance retrieval of the work in databases and search engines.

Review the publisher copyright form for a manuscript and retain as many rights to the work that to allow for maximum flexibility to re-use the work.

Consider the desired audience when choosing a journal for publication. Topic-specific journals or journals published by a specialized society may disseminate research results on a topic more efficiently to a desired audience than general science journals, such as Nature or Journal of the American Medical Association. More specialized journals, even with a potentially smaller readership, may offer an author broader dissemination of relevant research results to their peers in their specific field of research.

Publish “negative” as well as positive research findings. Publication of negative findings leads to further applicability of research and prevents others from duplicating research.

Publish a manuscript in a journal that is currently indexed by PubMed/MEDLINE. Citations in PubMed/MEDLINE are “crawled” by Google Scholar which can help promote the visibility and accessibility of a work.

Consider publishing a work in an open access journal. Open access journals allow authors to retain rights to the work that allow for many options for further dissemination of the research.

Partner with industry for a research project.

Present preliminary research findings at a meeting or conference and follow-up with a published manuscript, even if the research findings were negative.

Cultivate a series of academic and professional networks by participating in committees or other related activities. Volunteer for conference-related activities, participate in committees that issue position statements or clinical guidelines, act as a reviewer or Editor-in-Chief for a journal, serve as a mentor, develop relationships with policy-makers on the state or national level, be part of a team for conducting a systematic review, teach a Continuing Education class, serve as a grant application reviewer, participate in responsible conduct of research or curriculum committees affiliated with an academic or institution, serve on Institutional Review Boards or committees for animal studies, and other related activities.

Many major academic or research institutions have institutional digital repositories that archive the work of authors affiliated with the institution. Some institutional digital repositories allow for creation of specific online communities that showcase the research output of an author or group such as a research study, a department or a center.

Persuade the organizers of a conference to make publicly available the presentations made at conferences; not just the published abstracts.

If the work relates to a research study, create a website devoted to the research study and post materials such as peer-reviewed versions of manuscripts of journal publications, conference abstracts, supplemental materials such as images, illustrations, slides, or specimens, progress reports, to name a few. Authors are encouraged to review any copyright forms to confirm that they have the right to post materials on an institutional website. If the right to post a manuscript on an institutional website cannot be obtained, create links to the manuscript from your website using the PMID from a PubMed/MEDLINE citation or persistent URLs/DOIs that link directly to the publisher’s website. If the research study involves work that may be of interest to consumers or potential clinical trial participants, provide information tailored for the layperson.

If there is a website related to a research study, website developers should utilize SEO (search engine optimization) strategies to enhance retrieval of materials by search engines such as Google. The web developer should confirm that the web page titles describe the content of the website and include the name of the research study. Meta tags that note appropriate keywords should be included in the page header section. Search engines look at this “hidden content” and use this as a basis for search results page rankings.

Register with CiteULike or Connotea and start a “library” of publications related to a research project or by author and share the research project library with others.

If a work pertains to potential translational medicine applications, consider including a discussion of how the research could translate into clinical outcomes. This may provide insight for policy-makers as to the potential impact of the research study.

Start a blog devoted to the research project. Check out ResearchBlogging.org which is a site that allows bloggers to write about peer-reviewed research, but also to share that work with readers and bloggers around the world to learn about cutting-edge research developments.

Create a podcast describing the research project and submit the podcast to YouTube. Many major academic or research institutions have created their own YouTube channels and provide video services at no charge.

Issue press releases for significant findings and partner with the institutional media office to deliver findings to local media outlets. Be willing to provide interviews with the media that explain the research study or area of research.

Conduct outreach visits or provide seminars to other institutions/scientists, policy-makers, practicing physicians, consumers and health care providers to discuss a research study or topic related to current research efforts.

Collaborate with authors and researchers from other institutions and from other subject areas.

If the nature of the work is clinical, consider discussing clinical issues that arise with research investigators to help identify possible new areas of research to undertake, or vice versa. Such collaborative efforts help to accelerate translational research efforts.

Document all forms of research outputs such as journal articles, outreach visits, research data, conference materials, patents, etc. Keeping track of research outputs is crucial to documenting impact of research. See the Assessing the Impact of Research website to learn more about documenting the impact of research.

Citation Improvement

Once a paper is published with International Journal of Applied Information Systems (IJAIS), the authors must engage in proactive activities to promote their paper within the scientific community such that scholars do refer their research and cite the paper in their papers; thus improving the visibility of the authors with the research community.

Simple and effective methods to promote your paper to reach the widest and most appropriate audiences.

Twitter and Facebook: authors are increasingly promoting their content via Twitter and Facebook so it can be picked up by other researchers and practitioners. Place an announcement on your Twitter or Facebook page highlighting the publication of your article with a link to direct people to the online version.

LinkedIn: LinkedIn is an interconnected network of experienced professionals from around the world with over 55 million members. It is not just for career opportunities. When you create your profile that summarizes your professional expertise and accomplishments, why not include a mention of your articles?

Join academic social networking sites: academics, researchers, and practitioners are increasingly using social communities such as MyNetReseach and Academici as a way of meeting and conversing with people who share the same research interests.

CiteULike: you could add your article to your personal CiteULike library to share with others, which helps them discover literature which is relevant to their field. You can help with this process just by using CiteULike and through the invite a friend feature.

Discussion lists: post a short message to any discussion lists you are a member of, letting people know that the journal's latest issue, which includes your article, is now available. The easiest way to do this is to register for the table of contents alert for the journal so you can forward the email once you have received it.

Blogs: if you blog, don't forget to inform other users about your article.

Tweet success: How to boost your online impact

Traditional citation scores can't track the online impact of scientific research – it's time for scientists to get social media savvy

The conference program had not been kind. Joshua Drew's talk on shark biodiversity was buried in an afternoon slot on the penultimate day of the week-long Ecological Society of America 2012 meeting in Portland, Oregon. Ten years ago, the slot would probably guarantee the speaker a small, sleepy audience and a poor scientific impact. But not anymore.

Drew, a biologist at Columbia University in New York, took to Twitter to preview his presentation. A journalist attending the conference saw the tweet, turned up to the talk and blogged the study.

"The paper took on a life of its own," says Drew. Within a matter of days, his research had been covered by a number of popular science websites, reaching a large and international audience. And all from a single tweet.

The web, and particularly social media, is a powerful tool for spreading the word about new science. But is online success a sign of quality science? And should it matter for a researcher's career?

Deep impact

It has never been easy to measure scientific quality. At the moment, grant money and job offers are directed toward researchers who publish papers that go on to be cited by many other publications. Successful scientists have higher numbers of citations – and a higher citation score – than unsuccessful ones.

"There's clearly a strong correlation between citation and scientific impact, but it's not perfect," says Paul Wouters, who analyzes measures of scientific success at Leiden University in the Netherlands. A medical paper that details an important new procedure could save hundreds of lives, for instance – but if it is not cited in other publications, its citation score would remain low, and it would be considered a flop by this standard.

Wouters notes that one measure of success is not enough to judge scientific impact. "We need to think about portfolios," he says. "We should get away from the idea of the single, perfect indicator."

That's where the online world comes in. The rapidly growing number of users of social media, and other online tools, could provide an additional – or better – way to measure scientific impact. These tools extend far beyond Twitter – blogs, social networks and sites dedicated to sharing research are experiencing soaring membership rates (see "Your social media toolkit").

Those most convinced about the importance of this alternative, online scientific influence – sometimes called the altmetric impact – have even put together web tools that monitor and measure the buzz a new study generates online.

Heather Piwowar at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina and Jason Priem at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill built one of these tools in 2011.

Their creation, ImpactStory, pools data from blogs, online forums and social media into a simple graphical dashboard. Scientists can then watch the citations and discussions their research is generating in real time, and on a single screen.

Collecting altmetrics is the easy part – more difficult is to convince scientists that the information gathered from these online sources matters. This is particularly difficult when many of today's senior scientists have built their careers the traditional way, by publishing highly cited research papers.

Quirky or quality?

Altmetric skeptics argue that a big impact online is often a matter of shrewd marketing rather than quality science, says Mike Thelwall at the University of Wolverhampton in the UK.

Both organizations are keen to explore new ways of making sure they spend their money on research that makes a big impact, he says. It is possible that they may eventually use altmetric data to inform their allocation of grant money.

That can only be a good thing. Citation scores are the gold standard for measuring scientific impact only because the scientific community at large has elevated them to this position. But they cannot measure a scientist's full worth. If altmetrics do nothing else, they encourage us to rethink the way research is assessed – and that very idea could have a huge impact on science.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Tweet success"

Your social media toolkit

There are hundreds of ways to connect with your peers online. So, which are the sites worth using?
One in 40 researchers is now active on Twitter, a microblogging site that allows anyone to build a network of contacts and send short messages. You can use Twitter to reach out to the top names in your field and establish an online reputation.
More formal networking opportunities abound on professional networks such as LinkedIn and ResearchGate, with the latter boasting a science-focused membership of three million people.
Want to spread the word on your research before it has been published? Researchers are increasingly turning to personal blogs for this purpose. Others are uploading preprints, videos, figures and datasets to Figshare, a site that hosts the work of thousands of scientists. Most publishers do not consider uploads to Figshare as "prior publication" so will not use them as reasons to reject a paper later submitted to them.Mendeley allows users to build libraries containing the research most relevant to them and share these libraries with colleagues.
Once you've developed an online presence, you can use altmetric tools to work out how effective it is. Sites like ImpactStory and Altmetric pull together information from many social networks, blogs and websites to quantify the online activity a study is generating and present it at a glance.

The role of Facebook and Twitter in scientific citations and impact factors

This past weekend I was messing around on the internets (when I should have been relaxing by a river) when I was struck by a question: is there a way to see what impact social media has had on science?

Turns out, social media such as Facebook and Twitter may have a big influence on journal impact factors and paper citations... but more on that in a second. (For a primer on impact factor and citations, read my old post: "Something ghoti with science citations".)

First: my rambling thoughts.

Many of us scientists have this perception that "social media" is "important" for science, but I don't yet have a grasp on what that means, and I don't think anyone else does, either.

I've talked about the role of various social networking/Web2.0 sites in the scientific process ad nauseam. I've espoused my interest in Quora in my post "Quora for Scientists":

...with Quora, anyone can connect with potential experts. The question is how can Quora engage these experts? Why would anyone contribute their expert knowledge for free? I mean, I do it because... well I really enjoy talking with the public about science. Sometimes it's the really simple questions (e.g., What is the neurological basis of curiosity?) that really make me stop and think about "easy" questions I normally wouldn't worry about. That's exciting to me. I like to solve hard problems (especially ones that seem easy), and I think most scientists feel the same way.

Again, that's just another opinion. Another rationale added to many others.

But what do the data suggest?

I turned to the ISI Web of Knowledge, which provides excellent journal-specific metrics such as the total number of citations a journal has received, the journal's impact factor, and so on. (Sadly these metrics are closed to the general public; you need a license to view them.)

For each journal I got its 2010 impact factor as well as the total number of citations the journal has received. The former measures the average number of times a paper published in that journal was cited between 2008 and 2010. The latter is more of a "popularity" measure weighted by the number of publications in the journal.

I wanted to see what impact social media has on these two common metrics. To do that I looked to Facebook and Twitter to find which journals have their own Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. In the end I was left with 17 of the "top" peer-review general science and medical/biomedical publications that had both a Facebook page and a Twitter feed:

For each of these journals I then noted the number of "likes" on its Facebook page, which is a measure of how many people will see an announcement made by that journal. I also took note of how many Twitter followers each journal has, as well as how many people the journal follows and how many tweets per day the account makes, on average.

First, some simple metrics:
* Nature has received the most total cites with 511145
* The New England Journal of Medicine had the highest 2008-2010 impact factor at 53.5
* They have--by far--the most Facebook likes with 232385
* They also have the most Twitter followers with 31863
* The British Medical Journal has made the most tweets with 5405
* They follow the most twitterers with 1471
* And they are the most chatty with 5.4 tweets per day

First-pass metrics show that there is a strong correlation between number of tweets and number of followers (r = 0.63, p = 0.012) as well as the number of followers and tweets per day (r = 0.54, p = 0.037).

The question is, do social media metrics explain any of the variance in citations or impact factor?

Again, looking at simple correlations, we see that number of Facebook page likes for a journal and the number of twitter followers it has are correlated (r = 0.53, p = 0.044). This probably represents measure of social networking engagement.

But what's crazy is that number of Facebook page likes is strongly correlated with the total number of citations a journal has received (r = 0.78, p = 0.001)!

For those of you who like a little more scientific rigor than a bunch of uncorrected correlations, I also ran a multiple (log-transformed) linear regression for total citations and impact factor separately. What's interesting is that, in both cases, number of Facebook page likes seems to be the dominant significant factor in determining citations and impact factor.

However, for the impact factor analysis, both the number of people the journal follows on twitter, as well as the number of tweets per day, are inversely correlated with impact factor (partial correlations of r = -0.44 and r = -0.66, respectively)!

So what does all of this mean?

Well, it seems like having a social media presence is probably a reflection of the journal's popularity in general, but that, on average, the journals that do the most social media engagement (amongst the top-tier journals!) show the lowest impact factors.

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About Me

Nader Ale Ebrahim has
a Technology Management PhD degree from the Department of Engineering
Design and Manufacture, Faculty of Engineering, University of Malaya
(UM), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He holds a Master of Science in the
mechanical engineering from University of Tehran, Iran.